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Steve Mosby, author of Dark Room

The web has created some fantastic opportunities for authors, publishers and self-publishers alike, but this summer has seen the industry’s dark underbelly revealed in all its venal, pustulant ignominy. Things kicked off in July at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival where successful author Stephen Leather confessed, during an on-stage panel discussion, that he used fake accounts to promote his own books. This admission of sockpuppetry shocked the writing community and has been covered well by fellow panellistSteve Mosby.

UPDATED 29 August (see below for details).

Leather admitted to creating accounts on forums under assumed names in order to "create a buzz" about his own work. He also promotes and reviews his work using at least one pseudonymous Twitter account. In Leather’s own words, transcribed from a recording of the panel:

I’ll go onto several forums, from the well-known forums, and post there, under my own name and under various other names and various other characters. You build this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself. And then I’ve got enough fans…

Leather is not the only one promoting his own work through pseudonymous accounts. On 25 August, the New York Times revealed that the use of fake reviews is widespread. In exploring the case of reviewer-for-hire Todd Jason Rutherford, the NY Times exposed self-publishing poster boy John Locke who bought 300 reviews from Rutherford’s business, GettingBookReviews, spending about $6,000 to do so:

One thing that made a difference [to Locke’s sales] is not mentioned in [his best-selling guide to self-publishing] “How I Sold One Million E-Books.” That October, Mr. Locke commissioned Mr. Rutherford to order reviews for him, becoming one of the fledging service’s best customers. “I will start with 50 for $1,000, and if it works and if you feel you have enough readers available, I would be glad to order many more,” he wrote in an Oct. 13 e-mail to Mr. Rutherford. “I’m ready to roll.”

Mr. Locke was secure enough in his talents to say that he did not care what the reviews said. “If someone doesn’t like my book,” he instructed, “they should feel free to say so.” He also asked that the reviewers make their book purchases directly from Amazon, which would then show up as an “Amazon verified purchase” and increase the review’s credibility.

Rutherford’s venture collapsed when Google stopped him advertising his services and Amazon pulled many, although not all, of his reviews from their system. But that hasn’t put a stop to false reviews.

Indeed, many authors will recognise the phenomenon of the malicious one-star review designed to sabotage their book. Although Amazon prohibits “spiteful remarks” it is difficult to get such reviews removed. There’s absolutely no doubt that some of these reviews are coming from other authors who see self-publishing as a zero sum game in which if they lose out if another author does well. Others may come from an author’s fans who see anyone else’s success as a threat to their idol, or from griefers and trolls who just get off on attacking strangers in public.

When I spoke to Smashwords’ Mark Coker about this last month, he said:

It’s a flaw in the system that negativity can become so amplified. You can have a string of four and five star reviews, and then you get a string of one star reviews and it will torpedo your sales, because people will see those most recent reviews and it’s a warning sign to the potential readers. […] If there’s a reviewer that only leaves one star reviews, or if they’ve left nothing but a single negative review, they’re a carpet-bomber.

Carpet-bombers do not leave negative reviews in order to help readers avoid a bad book, they do it to undermine the reader’s confidence in positive reviews, damage the book’s ranking in Amazon and thus that author’s sales. They are, like fake positive reviews, designed to game the system. Explains author Robert Kroese:

The effect of a bad review goes far beyond the impact that it has on the author’s ego, however. The prominence of a book on Amazon.com is determined primarily by two factors: how well the book has sold and how positive its reviews are. More highly rated books are displayed more prominently, which leads to more sales. Increased sales leads to even more prominent display, which leads to still more sales. Through the miracle of the positive review snowball effect, a few hundred rave reviews can transform an otherwise unremarkable book into a worldwide bestseller.

The faking of reviews, both positive and negative, is a serious issue. At the core of the problem is the fact that there are huge benefits to behaving unethically but very little cost for those caught doing so. Stephen Leather and John Locke are unlikely to find their sales damaged by this furore. There is no motivation for them to clean up their acts and every motivation for them to continue behaving unethically. (Leather disputes that he faked reviews but has admitted to promoting his work through a pseudonymous Twitter account that he says disclosed his identity in the profile. He disagrees that this practice is unethical).

Unfortunately, there is also no motivation for Amazon, or other online booksellers, to clean up their own acts. Amazon exists to sell stuff. They will only begin to care about this if it starts to threaten sales, despite the fact that they could, if they wanted to, make it much harder for people to fake reviews. Kroese again:

Locke couldn’t have pulled off this fraud without some complicity from Amazon.com, however. Amazon.com has access to loads of information that is not available to the consumer (such as the IP addresses of reviewers and their purchase histories) that could help them identify fraudulent reviews and ban reviewers with a history of fraud. Sudden bursts of reviews (as happened with Locke) should also have sent up some red flags in Seattle. There’s simply no excuse for letting Locke get away with these sorts of shenanigans.

Google has, as Kroese points out, put a lot of time and effort into combatting attempts to game its search algorithm. There’s no reason at all why Amazon couldn’t devote more time and effort to combatting fake reviews. Indeed, Coker suggested that Amazon should “analyse the patterns and review behaviour of individual reviewers, and develop a credibility algorithm” to improve its ranking algorithms and minimise the damage done by fake and malicious reviews.

Yet the mood among authors I’ve spoken to is pessimistic. No one believes that Amazon will step up to the plate unless forced, so how do we force Amazon to act? How do we create a genuine cost to unethical behaviour? As Locke has shown, the rewards for being a review cheat are huge and the risks negligible. And, as a community, there’s almost nothing we can do to combat fake and malicious reviews even when we spot them.

At the end of his blog post, Mosby asks what we should do about the problem. Suggestions include petitions to convince Amazon to act; open letters from official bodies such as the Society of Authors; encouraging more readers to write genuine reviews; and getting higher profile coverage that might embarrass Amazon into acting. At this point, I don’t think there’s a silver bullet, short of Amazon and their competitors suffering a sudden rush of ethical blood to the head, so I’d advocate doing all of the above. What would you add to the list? And of those suggestions, where would you start? As a community, I feel that we have to act, because this shoddy behaviour affects all of us, readers and writers alike.

UPDATED 29 August

In the comments, Stephen Leather has pointed out that he did not publicly admit to writing fake reviews on Amazon. The actual extent of Leather's sockpuppetry is impossible to assess, although he did say in Harrogate that he has a network of friends and friends-of-friends who help "create a buzz" and whose relationship to Leather is unknown to the reader. Again, from Steve Mosby's transcript of a recording of the panel:

Steve Mosby: So you use sockpuppet accounts basically?

Stephen Leather: I think everyone does. Everyone does. Or I have friends who are sockpuppets, who might be real, but they might pick a fight with me.

SM: Are your readers aware of this, or…?

SL: Well, I think that everyone … well, are the readers aware of it? No … But they’re not buying it because of the sockpuppet. What you’re trying to do is create a buzz. And it’s very hard, one person, surrounded by a hundred thousand other writers, to create a buzz. I mean, that’s one of the things that publishers do. They create a buzz. One person on their own, difficult to create a buzz. If you’ve got ten friends, and they’ve got friends, and you can get them all as one creating a buzz, then hopefully you’ll be all right.